Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION We have been pleased by the reception of the first edition of Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. The book was reviewed in a variety of journals, it received the Silver Award in ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Awards, and the response from readers has been consistently positive. When the book was used in the classroom, students praised the anthology for its variety of stories, its strong literary quality, and the insight it gave them into the multifaceted world of Arab American life. As we had hoped, Dinarzad’s Children filled a gap in Arab American literature. Most previous anthologies had focused on poetry and creative nonfiction . The publication of Dinarzad’sChildren brought forth the many stories being written by Arab American writers, thus adding to this community’s growing literary tradition. Since the publication of the first edition, several new works of fiction have been published by established Arab American writers, including The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine, Origin by Diana AbuJaber , Once in a Promised Land by Laila Halaby, Stigma & The Cave by D. H. Melhem, The Belly Dancer of the Galaxy by Frances Khirallah Noble, and The Naqib’s Daughter by Samia Serageldin. New writers have entered the field, including Laila Lalami with her collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Stories, as well as her forthcoming novel, Secret Son, and Alia Yunis with her new novel, The Night Counter. Those whose stories were in the first edition have also been publishing new work, such as Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile, and Evelyn Shakir’s Remember Me to Lebanon. We hope that the publication of Dinarzad’s Children contributed to the momentum for this renaissance of Arab American fiction. This burgeoning of the genre demanded that we expand the anthology to reflect these changes. While our aim was to expand the anthology, we did not want to lose the strength of the first edition. Therefore, one of our goals was ix 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page ix to keep all the original writers. We asked the writers to submit new work for the second edition. In some cases, we chose to include the new work; in other cases, we kept the original stories. Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s “How We Are Bound” and Randa Jarrar’s “Lost in Freakin’ Yonkers” were two of the stories we knew needed to stay in the anthology. While Sarrafian’s story reveals the multilayered world of memory and guilt of immigrants fleeing war experience, Jarrar’s story uncovers the struggle of a young Arab American woman trying to make choices about her life and identity. The strength of the narrative voices and the complex characters in these stories required that we carry them into the second edition. Reading new stories by the writers led to the inclusion of exciting new work. Sahar Mustafah’s “Easy to Say” reveals the difficulties a young woman faces as she tries to negotiate the nuances of American culture while integrating herself into her new family and becoming a mother to a young teenage boy. Laila Halaby’s “Hair, Prayer, and Men” introduces a new dimension into the anthology by questioning assumptions made about identity based on physical appearance and the politics that can underlie even the simplest encounters between people. In making our selections, our goal was to create a new edition that holds onto the strongest stories while introducing new work from many of the writers. Our call for submissions yielded a variety of manuscripts from new writers. It was this discovery of new voices that we especially wanted to bring into the second edition. Some of these writers, like Zahie El Kouri, are just beginning to publish their work in literary journals; some, like Alia Yunis, are about to publish their first books; and some, like Rabih Alammedine, are established writers with several book publications. Bringing their voices into the anthology broadened its scope. There is now a wider range of generations, from D. H. Melhem, whose work helped to create a path for Arab American literature, to Amal Masri, who is just beginning to establish her voice as a writer. There is also a greater variety of backgrounds among the writers, whose origins go back to Lebanon, Palestine, Syria...